Crowdsourcing Innovation: A Risk Management Approach

This paper presents a first version of a methodology for risk management in crowdsourcing processes. The methodology comprises three phases. Each phase is interlinked and designed to build support and trust as the collaboration develops. Managing risk is central to open innovation strategy, but there aren ́t relevant scientific or empirical studies explaining the relationship between them. Steady progress has been made over the last years by many authors in establishing an understanding of open innovation strategy. There are several forms of open innovation. One of them is crowdsourcing innovation, the focus of this paper. In crowdsourcing strategy, a company posts a problem by an open call and a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem. The winning ideas are awarded some form of a bounty and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain. This strategy can be applied in two ways: (1) by internally identifying business problems and needs for innovation felt by individuals, teams and organizational units (seekers) that are then made available to a community of internal and external specialists motivated to provide their knowledge and skills to address those problems. In doing so brings, employees of the company can improve their internal visibility and be empowered in decision processes across the company; (2) by placing the company’s innovation challenges to a brokering service that can find the right people to present the solutions (solvers). This work provides overall guidelines to managing risks associated with crowdsourcing strategy and to apply open innovation and theoretical frameworks to understand how firms can benefit from accessing external knowledge in order to support their R&D processes.